March 16, 2011, 12:04 PM - When Nokia announced that it would be handing off its Qt commercial licensing and support business to Digia, a lot of pundits--myself included--wondered aloud or in print just how this would help Qt? My conclusion, admittedly, was not exactly positive.

Just a quick note to inform all benchmarking enthusiasts that we have released an updated VMmark 2.1 Benchmarking Guide. You can get it from the VMmark 2.1 download page. The updated guide contains a new troubleshooting section as well as more comprehensive instructions for using virtual clients and Windows Server 2008 clients.

Finally, today my new Android phone arrived and what was the first thing I did with it?

Of couse, searching for Animated Tiles in the market and installing it. With Qt running on it, the phone already feels worth at least twice as much. I really hope to find some time to play around more with Necessitas soon.

Right now I'm enjoying the post-release stress. Going back and catching up with what was delayed due to the release being priority and all... And enjoying huge discussions on Identi.ca like this one ;-)

How to mirror a web site from within your browser. Basically, there are two ways to surf the Net: interactively, with any text or graphical browser, or in batch mode, with a program that copies single pages or whole web sites to your hard drive for later use.

Recently, my little world of FOSS has been like a peaceful valley, surrounded by thunderstorms. As I sit in my recliner, watching the lightning strike, and hearing the booms which always follow, I am wondering how we all will weather this.

All the kindly, smart people I encounter in IRC, on blogs, forums, lists, wikis; all are people who believe in the power of giving to the world; sharing knowledge and work, music and programming, art and packaging. And yet there is infighting again. I've read the major posts which have become the flash points, and many of the thunderous responses. Canonical vs. Gnome, or Gnome vs. KDE, and on and on.

Finally, a bit of sunlight in the west: Allison Randal's reasonable and thorough discussion of the entire matter. As a bonus, she titles it after one of my favorite songs from the 60's: With A Little Help From My Friends.

Listen: As a world-wide multi-project FLOSS community, we are a diverse collection of cultures, customs, and governance structures, and some things ...read more...

At the last successful, sold-out Sencha Conference 2010, I did two introductory talks about JavaScript and WebKit, mainly targeted for web application developers. Since a few weeks ago, the videos for these talks have been available for you to watch.

The other talk Compiling and Optimizing Your Own Browser with WebKit (vimeo.com/18780399 for the video, http://slidesha.re/fPSvXX for the slide deck), mostly showing few tricks you can leverage to understand how your web applications work. For example, by using QtWebKit and capturing all the drawing commands and the corresponding timestamp, it is very easy to have a slow-motion rendering of your web page. As I showed it in the talk, it is even possible to go back in time, i.e. rendering your web page backwards.

When I got the idea to implement system connections I thought in just fixing a bug, but since NetworkManager is changing its API and ABI during the 0.8 to 0.9 transition the challenge has increased.

The main change from 0.8 to 0.9 specification is that now all connections are system wide with new DBus interfaces for the clients (Plasma NM for instance) to provide secrets (user name, password, encrpyt keys) to NetworkManager. Most of the changes are there to shrink NM's clients (Plasma NM, nm-applet, cnetworkmanager) source code, so it seems to be good change. We will need to change Solid's NM backend to meet the new specificaton, which can be problematic for distributions because they will only be available in KDE SC 4.7, scheduled to be released in late July, .

Talking about distributions, one Fedora guy showed up in kde-networkmanagement mailinglist. NM-0.9 is going to be released next week and Fedora guys are thinking in using NM-0.9 in F15, preferably with a working Plasma NM. To do so would require changes in KDE SC 4.6x API used ...read more...

I have added more feeds to the V12N blog aggregator, so there is even more great content coming in now. If you feel there is a blog site that should be part of the Planet V12N please let me know. We want to make sure we are getting as much quality content as possible showing up for everyone.

This week we had some major announcements with vCenter Operations being launched, an acquisition announced of Wavemaker (Spring), and who could possibly have missed the VMware View iPad client? Don’t forget, VMworld 2011 call for papers was announced, get those submissions in! Have a great weekend!

Eric Sloof - vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard - VMware has released a great new product which is able to diagnose and analyse vSphere performance metrics. vCenter Operations Standard is for vCenter administrators who want to better understand the performance of their virtual infrastructure, and to diagnose and correct ...read more...

However, Tony’s email was prompted by a discussion on LXer about why KDE does not listen to its users (that was the point of view of many of the people making comments, you can make your own judgement about whether or not that is a fair criticism). On the suggestion of an LXer reader, Tony brought his concerns to us. We in turn discussed them with some members of KDE’s marketing team and Tony and I had an exchange of emails, now published by LXer.

I didn't have time to write a short blog, so I wrote a long one instead.

Excitement. Lack of sleep. More excitement. Many things not finished. Yep, a major release. Despite a crashing laptop (every 30 min it hangs, I'm afraid it is the heath) I'm having fun preparing for the biggest event since I joined the openSUSE community: the release of openSUSE 11.4!

The marketing team had a meeting 2 weeks ago to prepare for 11.4. But we weren't the only ones working hard. And this week, our release dude, Coolo, got sick and AJ had to replace him. Well, the GoldMaster was in time, so AJ, great work. And Coolo: if a doctor tells you to stop working it probably makes sense to listen.